SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories from the Lotus Sutra

Dogen-Zenji so cherished the Lotus Sutra that he actually carved a selection of it into his door. This, the core text of not only Zen but the whole of Mahayana Buddhism, has never lost its appeal among practitioners of the Way. Join us for our SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories From the Lotus Sutra led by Sensei Joshin Byrnes, Sensei Genzan Quennell

Most of us do experience ourselves as somewhat scattered or distracted, perhaps not in every arena of life but at least in some. And you don’t have to be an experienced meditator to know that. Just sitting down, trying to think something through, not uncommonly, it’s not long before we’re just gone. Our minds jump to the past and our minds go over and over and over and over some situation where we’re now filled with regret, but not thinking about it in a way to see how to make amends or have a different skill set in the future, we’re just going over it and over it and over it and over it. Or, our minds jump to the future, and we create a scenario that has not happened and may never happen, and we’re filled with anxiety about that.

My favorite example, which I use a lot these days is: I was teaching with a friend Bob Thurman, he’s a Professor of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University…as an example of just that mental state, I said, it’s like you’re sitting in an airplane in an airport in New York, and you start thinking, Oh no, this plane’s going to be late, I bet that means I miss the connection. Oh no? What’s that gonna mean? It means I’m going to land in Portland, Oregon…and it’s going to be like after midnight. What’s going to happen to me? Oh no, there won’t be any cabs, there won’t be any buses. What’s going to happen? I don’t know… I do have a kind of mantra that I use when I see my mind beginning in that direction, which is, something will happen…Maybe six weeks or so after we’d done that class together, I got an e-mail from Bob saying, “Just landed in Portland. Lots of cabs.”

…So we jump to the past, we jump to the future, judgment, speculation; we’re all over the place. And so the skill set of deepening concentration is gathering. It’s gathering all that scattered energy, attention that’s all over the place, bringing it together. And then we find our attention has flown off again, no doubt, we just bring it together again. And then it goes off, and we bring it together again, not squeeze it down and try to hold it down, but it’s really a sense of gathering, so that over time what happens is that we experience a much greater sense of steadiness of attention, and centeredness. And power because that’s a lot of energy that could be available to us but usually isn’t because it’s just all over the place.

What we gather our attention around could be a lot of different things, and different systems will use different objects: mantra, prayer, visualization, imagery, sound; the breath. I’ve always practiced in schools that really emphasize the breath as that object, that centering point, and I’ve appreciated different things about it. As my first teacher said, you don’t have to believe anything in order to feel your breath. You don’t have to call yourself a Buddhist or a Hindu or reject anything else, if you’re breathing, you can be meditating. And then as he went on to say-I’ve always felt, quite charmingly-he said, the breath is quite portable. Here we are in a zendo, clearly practicing together with great intentionality, and as we get used to resting with the feeling of the breath, because it’s very portable, we have a resource wherever we are. We can be at a contentious meeting at work or waiting anxiously in a doctor’s waiting room, and we can settle our attention on the feeling of the breath. No one needs to know you’re doing it. You don’t have to close your eyes, you don’t have to look weird; you don’t have to make an announcement, but you’re breathing and so you can center.

And that steadiness, that centeredness also serves as a kind of integration of our being because the larger manifestation of that scattered-ness or distractedness is more a sense of fragmentation. It’s the way we can have so much role identification in our lives, so much compartmentalization in our lives, the ways people say, I feel like I’m one person at work and a different person at home. Or my very favorite example of that was when I was teaching in New York and someone raised her hand and she said, I feel filled with loving-kindness and compassion for all beings everywhere as long as I’m alone. But once I’m with others, it’s really rough. Or we can feel the other way, we can feel fine when we’re with others and very ill-at-ease being alone, so our lives can be so cut apart. Here too, we’re bringing it all together, all those different aspects, all those different facets of ourselves, we’re just bringing it all together. So it’s like weaving a sense of cohesiveness, of wholeness, just in that simple act.

This excerpt was transcribed from Sharon’s teachings at Upaya on April 18, 2011, recorded as Part 3 of 8 in the series “Real Happiness” with Roshi Joan Halifax. Listen to the complete talk here.